Building a standard maven or gradle project is substantially easier than most other languages, in my experience.

I don't have to setup a $GOPATH, downloading dependencies doesn't kick off a million scripts that end up running native compilers, like in the node/ruby/python/php ecosystem. I can build and run a Java project on almost any system, without making substantial changes to my environment and without giving up and using docker for my dev environment.

"gradle init --type java-application"

Honestly I haven't had to deal with the issues you talk about in the last five years (which is as long as I've been writing java commercially, before that I was mostly a C developer).

Having had recent experience with Go and Javascript/Node, I can't say either struck me as especially easier or more intuitive to get started with.

Most likely because you have dealt with them many times before that you don't notice them anymore or prevent them in the first place while setting up a project. But everytime I need to do something in Java I get bitten by this stuff, and I'm not the only one.

I've never had to, was my point. Not since waaay back in the day when I was first learning about it (more than 20 years ago). I came to java (commercially) 5 years ago, and it's not that I've dealt with it so much I don't see it, I've never had to deal with it.

Maybe things have got much better in the last handful of years, I don't know. My experience of getting started with a java project in that time has been no worse (and not really any better either) than in other languages.

Ok I'm super sympathetic to how annoying it is to manage JDKs, but holy hell it's not like Python tooling (for example) is a walk in the park. Are you using system python? Is it pip, with it's constantly breaking upgrades, or poetry, which isn't necessarily production ready? Do you have a virtualenv? Pipenv? How do you package it?

Java tooling can be painful but to me it's VERY squarely middle of the road.

I agree, Python is horrible. And I don't even like the language itself much. I like Julia, for example - although packaging there isn't great either.

My problem is that Java is one of the (probably) 3 biggest languages in use, both investment and dev time wise, and it's overall just not that great.

I honestly wish I knew what was better - it's not like I've ever used a build tool I didn't hate in some way. Part of the problem with Java to me is that (IMO) maven is the only build tool that doesn't make force me to spend significant time maintaining the build as well as the code, but maven is... very much a local maximum.

I generally agree with "not that great" - Java the language I actually find fine, and to me it scratches a lot of the pragmatism that Go tries to get, with different warts in each. I try to avoid the Java framework ecosystem so I don't have to deal with beans and annotations and piles of codegen, not because I don't like the language. And Android has done much damage to the community's impression of Java.